Resolution enhancement in in-line holography by numerical compensation of vibrations

TL;DR

This paper presents a numerical method to compensate for vibrations in in-line holography, significantly improving the resolution of reconstructed objects by nearly doubling it through post-processing techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a novel numerical approach to correct vibration-induced blurring in holograms, enhancing resolution without hardware modifications.

Findings

Resolution improved by almost a factor of 2

Applicable to optical and electron holograms

Effective for both plane and spherical wave holography

Abstract

Mechanical vibrations of components of the optical system is one of the sources of blurring of interference pattern in coherent imaging systems. The problem is especially important in holography where the resolution of the reconstructed objects depends on the effective size of the hologram, that is on the extent of the interference pattern, and on the contrast of the interference fringes. We discuss the mathematical relation between the vibrations, the hologram contrast and the reconstructed object. We show how vibrations can be post-filtered out from the hologram or from the reconstructed object assuming a Gaussian distribution of the vibrations. We also provide a numerical example of compensation for directional motion blur. We demonstrate our approach for light optical and electron holograms, acquired with both, plane- as well as spherical-waves. As a result of such hologram deblurring, the resolution of the reconstructed objects is enhanced by almost a factor of 2. We believe that our approach opens up a new venue of post-experimental resolution enhancement in in-line holography by adapting the rich database/catalogue of motion deblurring algorithms developed for photography and image restoration applications.